Q

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Look up Q or q in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh
Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn
Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt
Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

Q is the seventeenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /ˈkjuː/) is spelled cue.^[1]

History

Egyptian hieroglyph wj	Phoenician qoph	Etruscan Q	Greek Qoppa

The Semitic sound value of Qôp (perhaps originally qaw, "cord of wool", and possibly based on an Egyptian hieroglyph) was /q/ (voiceless uvular plosive), a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in English or most Indo-European ones. In Greek, this sign as Qoppa Ϙ probably came to represent several labialized velar plosives, among them /kʷ/ and /kʷʰ/. As a result of later sound shifts, these sounds in Greek changed to /p/ and /pʰ/ respectively. Therefore, Qoppa was transformed into two letters: Qoppa, which stood for a number only, and Phi Φ which stood for the aspirated sound /pʰ/ that came to be pronounced /f/ in Modern Greek.

In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the sounds /k/ and /g/ (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, Q was used to represent /k/ or /g/ before a rounded vowel (e.g. "EQO" = ego), K before /a/, and C elsewhere. Later, the use of C (and its variant G) replaced most usages of K and Q: Q survived only to represent /k/ when immediately followed by a /w/ sound.^[2]

The Etruscans used Q only in conjunction with V to represent /kʷ/

Usage

In most modern western languages written in Latin script, such as in Romance and Germanic languages, Q appears almost exclusively in the digraph QU, though see Q without U. In English this digraph most often denotes the cluster /kw/, except in borrowings from French where it represents /k/ as in plaque. In Italian qu represents /kw/ (where /w/ is the semivowel allophone of /u/); in German, /kv/; and in French, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese, /k/ or /kw/; in the same languages qu replaces c for /k/ before front vowels i and e, since in those contexts c is a fricative and letter 'k' is seldom used outside loan words.) Danish abolished the letter in 1872, although it's still part of the alphabet. A consequence of this was the change in spelling of the word 'kvinde' (woman), which prior to 1872 was spelt 'Quinde'. As a result the term 'kvinde med q' (woman spelt with q) is used for an old-fashioned woman, whilst 'kvinde med k' is used about a modern woman.

In the Aymara, Aleut, Yup'ik, Inuit, Greenlandic, Uzbek, Quechua, and Tatar languages, as well as romanised Arabic, Q is a voiceless uvular plosive. [q] is also used in the IPA for the voiceless uvular plosive, as well as in most transliteration schemes of Semitic languages for the "emphatic" qōp sound. The sound is rendered with letter ﻕ in Arabic script.

In Maltese and Võro, Q denotes the glottal stop.

In Albanian, q represents the voiceless palatal plosive, /c/.

In Chinese Hanyu Pinyin, Q is used to represent the sound [tɕʰ], which is close to English "ch" in "cheese".

In Fijian, Q represents the prenasalized voiced velar plosive [ŋɡ].

In Xhosa and Zulu, Q represents the postalveolar click [kǃ].

In Kiowa, Q represents a glottalized velar plosive, /kʼ/.

Q, which is rarely seen in a word without a U next to it in English, is the second most rarely used letter in the English language. The Q represents a voiceless velar plosive, contrary to the belief that it represents a labialized voiceless velar plosive. If this were the case, there would be no need for the "U" at the end.

The lowercase Q is usually seen as a lowercase O with a descender (i.e., downward vertical tail) extending from the right side of the bowl, with or without a swash (i.e., flourish). The lowercase Q's descender is usually typed without a swash due to the major style difference typically seen between the descenders of the lowercase G (a loop) and lowercase Q (vertical). The descender of the lowercase Q is usually handwritten finishing with a rightward swash to distinguish from the leftward facing curved descender on the lowercase G.

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of Q

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Quebec	– – · –

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

In Unicode, the capital Q is codepoint U+0051 and the lower case q is U+0071.

The ASCII hexadecimal codes for capital Q and lowercase q are 51 and 71, respectively. These equal 81 and 113 in decimal, and 01010001 and 01110001 in binary.

The EBCDIC code for capital Q is 216 and for lowercase q is 152.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "Q" and "q" for upper and lower case respectively.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Q

• List of English words containing Q not followed by U
• Ќ
• Қ
• Mind your Ps and Qs

References

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